PUCKO'S PERSPECTIVE: Baseball is lacking in adaptability

Tuesday

Jul 22, 2014 at 5:00 PM

Runs are down. Strikeouts are up. Fewer balls are being put into play.

Bill PuckoColumnist

A week or so back, a couple of guys on the Fox Sports Radio Network spent part of the afternoon discussing how to make baseball more interesting. They took callers' suggestions — normally a counterproductive practice.

Among the solicited comments were: shorten the game to seven innings; institute the international tiebreaker they use in softball where a runner is placed on second base to start the inning; and the most bizarre, play five five-out innings. These were all designed to both shorten the game and add a little offense.

You couldn't do a show like this about football, or basketball for that matter. There isn't enough wrong with those two sports. They both have one thing that baseball, and soccer for that matter, lack. Adaptability.

Football wasn't afraid to make moves to juice the offense, protect its quarterbacks, adjust to safety concerns on kickoffs and invent replay. Basketball has likewise been open to change over the years. The implementation of the three-point shot by the old American Basketball Association in 1967 and by the NBA in 1979, might be the most fundamental change in any of our favorite games.

Baseball meanwhile clings to its past. The last fundamental change in the way the game is played on field came in 1968 when they lowered the pitcher's mound five inches. That followed a season when Bob Gibson of the St. Louis Cardinals posted a 1.13 earned run average, and Boston's Carl Yastrzemski won a batting crown with an average of .301.

These days the problems are more fundamental. Runs are down. Strikeouts are up. Fewer balls are being put into play. Despite less actual action on the field, most games are still taking over three hours to play. Baseball is becoming less relevant to younger fans. Washington infielder Anthony Rendon on Sunday said that he doesn't watch baseball because it's "too long and boring." He's getting ridiculed for those comments. He should be listened to.

Soccer is in the same boat. Despite metrics that indicate the sport is on the verge of real emergence, it still lives in fear of the international governing body FIFA. Which is why among the 19 teams in Major League Soccer, only two, the DC United and the Seattle Sounders, have won more than half their games. There have been 57 ties. Ties don't fly. Even the National Hockey League knows that.

Baseball and soccer are still fundamentally good sports. They'll survive, but they are and will continue to be held back in this country because they lack adaptability.

Bill Pucko has been in the Rochester sports broadcasting business for 30 years. He currently produces and hosts the Vision High School Sports Beat and Rochester Press Box from the Garage Door on WHAM-TV, and operates the website BylineSports.com. Bill has been a Messenger Post columnist for five years.